The present invention relates to an information processing system in which a selection and setting operation is conducted by a user for a plurality of items displayed on a display screen, and in particular, to a method and an apparatus for customizing a user interface with the display screen.
In the society today where information is quite valuable as a resource, operability is an issue to be emphasized in information processing systems for efficiency improvement of the user.
The user processes a great amount of information through an information processing system such as a workstation and a personal computer in many cases. However, to complete processing of information of a certain type, there are required a series of operations such as a data input operation, dialog open and close operations, and selections of items (data items, work items, and/or processing procedure item names). These operations are conducted in most cases through routine jobs in which similar operations are repeatedly executed.
For example, in a case where data beforehand created is displayed in the form of a graph, it is necessary to set attributes such as a type of graph (circle, bar, or broken-line graph); types of lines, colors, graticule, reference lines; a graph drawing area, and a title name for the graph. Since these setting operations are carried out for each graph and hence forms a routine job in which the similar operations are repeatedly effected as many as there are graphs.
In this situation, there arises a problem of how to efficiently materialize the interface with the user in the information processing system of this kind and hence there have been heretofore provided various user interface configurations or systems.
However, either one of the user interface systems is configured such that items beforehand prepared in the system are displayed in the display screen for the user to select only the necessary items therefrom so as to set the items.
In this connection, a method of setting attributes of a graph in an operation to create a graph has been described in a manual "UIBT Operation (3050-7-404-10)".
In this regard, from a viewpoint of each user, the selection and setting operation is rarely conducted for all items displayed on the display screen. Namely, in many cases, the selection and setting operation is required to be carried out only for a portion of the items.
For example, in order to display a plural pairs of data items in an identical graph format, when the color and the width of lines are not limited, namely, are allowed to be arbitrarily set, there need only be achieved the selection and setting operation for the attributes such as a graph type and a graph drawing area.
However, the conventional user interface systems are configured as described above such that all items beforehand prepared in the system are presented in the display screen for the user to select therefrom and to set only the necessary items in an item-by-item fashion.
In consequence, there arises a problem that the selection and setting operation only for the necessary items requires a long period of time and is troublesome. Particularly, in a case where the items to be selected astride a plurality of screens or where only a portion of a setting item is to be changed or in a case where an identical routine operation is repeatedly carried out, there exists a problem that the operation is onerous and inefficient.